Neil Darragh discusses guilt and sin in developing an Earth consciousness in our spirituality.

For some years now, many local churches have inserted a four-week “Season of Creation” into their annual liturgical cycle. This has helped refocus church-going Christians on the basic Christian belief in God as Creator — Creator not just of humans but of everything. It seems obvious; yet it’s a moral minefield. Inherent in this belief in a Creator God is the moral mandate to treat all created beings (for us this means, in effect, the beings and processes of Earth) as worthy of appreciation and respect.

This mandate requires us to maintain careful limits on when and how much we use other beings for human benefit. We will, almost certainly, continue to “use” other Earth beings for our own well-being, especially for food and shelter. But given this, can we still hope that our fundamental attitude might be one of appreciation and respect?

From Using to Appreciating

Over the last 100 years or so, scientific measurement has brought us face-to-face with the destructive effects of human behaviour in the planet Earth. Our simple naiveté about the “goodness” of industrial development has largely disappeared. An awareness of the delicacy and complexity of our relationships to the other creatures of Earth is now widespread. Few of us still assume that “progress” (“you can’t fight progress”) is always approved by God and the angels.

Many Christian Churches, such as those belonging to Eco Church NZ (www.ecochurch.org.nz) and organizations like A Rocha (www.arocha.org.nz) have recently moved beyond a largely personal spirituality (“me and God” or “me and the Church”) towards a spirituality committed to reducing destructive human behaviour in the Earth.

Even relatively painless liturgical changes, such as Prayers of Intercession concerned with the environment, and homilies which interpret the Christian Scriptures for an ecologically alert congregation, help to move us on to a more Earth-focused spirituality. A great deal of Christian education, especially in schools, has also, perhaps even more rapidly, changed from an emphasis on personal spirituality and Church-belonging to an emphasis on the wholeness (an “integral ecology” in Pope Francis’s terms) of human beings and the larger Earth.

Yet one thing that has not happened, as far as I am aware, is a reinterpretation of the Christian understanding of “sin” and its close companion, “guilt”. These are the underside of Christian spirituality and may reveal more of what we really are than do our aspirations to beauty, wonder and wholeness.

Guilt as Stimulus for Change

Many (most) Christian educators and thinkers seem to be avoiding talk about “guilt” and “sin” as too negative. Yet the ecologists and environmentalists among us are actively, and with increasing effectiveness, provoking feelings of guilt in us.

The intention here is to confront people, organizations and governments with messages that
say: “You shouldn’t be doing this. This is wrong.”

While accepting the accusation and the guilt, we need nevertheless to distance ourselves from that “disabling guilt” which leaves us helpless and hopeless. Psychologists and therapists often need to deal with this kind of disabling guilt. Yet there is a need, too, to rescue the concept of “guilt” from its sometimes disabling effects. Guilt can be a positive stimulus for change, an awareness that there is something in my life that I should change.

“Sin-talk” as a Resource

Over the centuries, a Christian spirituality which practises some regular form of examination of conscience is simultaneously uncovering the width and depth of “sin”. This is the underbelly of our spirituality which anchors us within the real world.

Some sins are more destructive than others; some are more trivial than others and need to be treated so. Some just aren’t sins at all but leftovers from childhood or parental safeguarding. Some of this sin-talk has been damaging and left people immobilized in guilt. A lot of this is being re-evaluated and re-sorted nowadays.

Some areas of spirituality and moral action have been barely talked about at all. One of these neglected areas, it seems to me, is that of identifying and dealing with our sinful relationships with Earth.

We may prefer to talk about “wrongdoing” or “making bad choices” instead of “sins”. Any of these probably works in some circumstances, but “sin-talk” is older, more sophisticated and better mapped, I think, so there is some value in retaining it.

Sin is about doing harm. Even if we would rather avoid “sin-talk” altogether, it is clear nevertheless that many human beings (not all) are doing a great deal of harm to Earth. Where these sinful Earth relationships have been recognised, there have already been moves, individually and collectively, towards less destructive, more integrated relationships.

Canadian environmental lawyer David R Boyd has named some of the successes over recent decades in pushing back the damage: endangered species preserved, thousands of new parks, the salvation of the ozone layer, the exponential growth of renewable energy; the race to be the greenest city in the world; remarkable strides in cleaning up the air and water; the banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals; and some movement towards a circular economy where waste is a thing of the past.

Actions, Attitudes, Collusions and Omissions

In spite of some successes, our respect for Earth still seems to stand alongside or in addition to our normal everyday spirituality and morality. It seems unlikely that we can reverse our still widespread destructive behaviour unless we can bring our Earth spirituality into the central core of our morality. There are often “no-go” areas, or “too-hard” areas in our day-to-day self-assessment where we just don’t notice the failures. For many of us, our Earth relationships are one of these moral vacuum areas.

We can begin to uncover some of this when we note that sins, traditionally, are not simply actions, they may also be attitudes, collusions and omissions.

As well as destructive actions, our sins may also be attitudes (not just single actions) which lie behind and result in an array of repeated wrong actions.

There are also sins which are collusions with unjust and destructive structures. We probably did not cause these and didn’t deliberately decide to do anything evil. We have just gone along with the way the world is.

And then there are sins of omission. There is evil that we are caught up in not by positive choice but just by allowing them to continue without protest.

Perhaps it is because many of the destructive relations with Earth are cases of collusion or omission that we fail to see them or take them seriously — and to recognise them as sins.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 285 September 2023: 4-5